Computers are ubiquitous in today's society. They come in all different varieties and can be found in places such as automobiles, the grocery store, banks, personal digital assistants, cell phones, as well as in many businesses. As will be appreciated by almost anyone owning a computer, computers often need to be configured and re-configured for various reasons. For example, a computer may need to have all of the hardware drivers updated because the computer manufacturer has made new drivers available. Alternatively, a computer system may need to have its operating system updated.
In a company environment, sometimes called an “enterprise” scenario, the company may have hundreds or thousands of computers all of which will need to be updated from time to time. People typically referred to as “system administrators” or the like are often employed by these companies, where the primary responsibility of the system administrator may be updating all the computers within an organization. Additionally, system administrators are often tasked with ensuring that the computers continue to operate properly. In an organization that includes hundreds or thousands of computers, the task of monitoring various configuration details and monitoring the computers' operational status can be daunting. This problem is only exacerbated when the company's computers are spread out all over the world in different geographic locations.
While a company's remote systems may be monitored and configured by the system administrator, if the remote computers and the system administrator are connected via the Internet, firewalls are often implemented to prevent access by hackers with surreptitious motives. Because of these firewalls, specific routing through the firewall is often required to allow the system administrator remote access. This specialized routing not only compromises the integrity of the firewall by providing a potential access point for hackers, it also may require additional effort on behalf of the system administrator of making specialized and often customized changes to the firewall, such changes might be done remotely or involve the additional burden of traveling to some or all remote locations.
Remote computer management of systems that are located all over the world also can be very slow and time consuming. For example, if a system administrator simply wants to determine, for each of the hundreds or thousands of systems being managed, which operating system they are running, he would have to issue a command to each of the remote computers and wait for a response, including the latency associated with each of the remote computers.
Thus, a remote monitoring and configuration system is needed that addresses one or more of these problems.